Hovhannisyan, Gagik

       Hi everybody!  I am Gagik Hovhannisyan and my preferred pronouns are he/his. I am excited to start a new semester at a new school surrounded with new people.  I am a philosophy major and I’m interested in law and government.  I recently transferred from Santa Monica College and I have two really interesting years ahead of me in UCLA.  I had a hard time choosing a major in my first year and a half at SMC.  I changed so many majors throughout that time and was frustrated because I believed that I would fail to get my lower division requirements.  When I first took a philosophy class as just an IGETC requirement I felt that it really suits me and I had a lot of fun taking the course.  Then I did a little research and found out that the lower division requirements for philosophy were just four classes and I thought, why not give it a shot?  And that is how I ended up as a philosophy major.

        Transferring to UCLA was also a big surprise for me because I started college a little poorly and even ended up retaking a class(and of course acing it) later on.  I had a deadline to answer to another university the day I received the news from UCLA.  I was planning on calling and accepting them without even checking the results from UCLA.  So, it was a big surprise for me and that is why I am so excited to start a new journey here.

       I chose this class because even though I took so many classes that had nothing to do with philosophy(like advanced chemistry, precalc, stats, and etc.), I never took anything related to art or art history.  I had to choose a diversity class and I was searching around and came up to this class and it really interested me because it was both diverse(Chicanx, Latinx) and it had something to do with art and culture.  I really like new things and I’m excited to learn about a new culture.